France and the Balkans in the New Age

CIRSD Program Director, Nikola Jovanović discusses French policies during the Cold War and beyond, the relationship of the Fifth Republic with Germany and how all these affected developments in the European Union, the European Continent and regions that some consider to be on its periphery.

"Madeleine Albright once argued that for one to understand Europe, one needs to be either a genius or French. Indeed, the European Community, established some ten years after the end of the Second World War, represented a project furthering predominantly French interests. For the first time since wars led by Napoleon, France distinguished itself as a leading Western European force, capable of securing its strategic autonomy from the rest of the great powers, including the United States. Such community of European states, reflected the French ideals of the continent in its core. At the time, the Community was portrayed as a political union ran by great powers exerting their influence on the rest of the world (which sometimes also implied military interventions).

Charles de Gaulle, the key French figure of the epoch, devoted much of his efforts to stimulate a development of a multipolar world. The idea of national sovereignty is a perpetual French obsession, materialized by de Gaulle through maintaining the veto power in the EC and developing a nuclear arsenal. Despite being an avid anti-communist, he occasionally obstructed US interests in Africa and Asia, treating thereby a dominance by one great power (for which he believed to be the US) as a potential threat to the French sovereignty."

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